![]() ![]() ![]() My white coat waits in the corner like a father. Afterward, a small mob, more than two dozen surgeons, wanted to know where they could find a copy of that poem. ![]() When I finished, there was perfect, motionless, pin-drop silence. Once in the 1980s, with a twelve-minute slot on a humanities panel at the American College of Surgeons' Clinical Congress-an immense meeting in the cavernous Moscone Center in San Francisco-I read "Talking to the Family" to a packed room: three hundred surgeons in folding chairs, another 40 or 50 on the floor in the aisles. On reading "To a Fourteen-Year-Old Girl in Labor and Delivery"1 or "Death,"2 non-native speakers and medical students (and sometimes those who are both at once), who thought they didn't like poetry, discover that not only can they understand the stuff, but they like it a lot. The poems are beautifully simple and direct, and yet, as with all good literature, when you reread them or compare your interpretation with others', you discover more and more about them. To hear him read his poems was a treat-in part because, in the southern tradition, he was a good storyteller, but mostly because he was a good poet. Poet and cardiologist, he was also a Mozart-lover, director of one of the first emergency medicine residencies, and for many years, Associate Dean of Admissions at Emory University Medical School. John Stone died in Atlanta, Georgia, early on Thursday, November 6, 2008. ![]()
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